As more businesses migrate services to the cloud, their experiences help to clarify the benefits that cloud can deliver. Attitudes to the cloud vary, as CDW’s Cloud 401 Report indicates. The firm asked businesses if they felt claims about the cloud were true or false in their experience.

Cost savings drew equal responses, with 17 percent of respondents believing the claim was true and the same number stating that it was false. Increased flexibility was seen as true by 19 percent and false by 7 percent, while ease of administration was seen as true by 13 percent and false by 8 percent.

The differences in opinion suggest that cloud migration delivers different benefits to different businesses, so it’s important to set goals that are relevant to your individual circumstances. By looking at your specific business, financial or operational goals, you can set realistic expectations for the savings you can make with cloud migration.

Reduce Infrastructure Complexity

Looking at infrastructure, cloud can help your business make savings in the resources you commit to managing, maintaining and upgrading your environment. With applications and services residing on a host’s infrastructure, you can refocus your team on more strategic tasks.

You can also reduce the direct operational and capital costs of building or maintaining an infrastructure capable of supporting the high-speed, agile levels of service that are essential to a cloud environment.

Deploying composable infrastructure in a private cloud can generate further savings. In a composable infrastructure the infrastructure elements form a shared resource. This gives your IT team the ability to reconfigure or compose resources to meet the specific demands of a business application or service. When the requirement is complete, the resources return to the shared pool.

Minimize Deployment Delays

A composable infrastructure in a private cloud also delivers the essential agility to support business demands for faster service delivery. An agile environment enables faster deployment of existing services and reduces the time needed to develop and roll out new services.

Scalability represents another important saving. Cloud-based resources are scalable on demand. That can eliminate the delays in acquiring and deploying additional resources to meet increased demand or respond to problems and business opportunities. In essence, cloud gives your team the ability to leverage resources as and when they need them, without the need to overprovision.

Lower Security Risks

A private cloud can also reduce your security risks and associated costs by giving you greater control over data in storage and in transit. This is even more important if your business is subject to compliance by customer SLAs or industry regulations.

Cut Response Times

Perhaps the biggest saving is in the effort required to meet the demands of the business, particularly if your company is focused on digital transformation. A private cloud environment, combined with high levels of automation and visibility, reduces the time needed to make decisions about resource allocation and maintain high levels of availability for users. It reduces the time needed to develop and deploy the new services required by business users and makes it quicker and easier to respond to requests from business users.

Find out more

If you would like to know more about our services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.